Only 10 years ago, organized labor was dying a slow death, but the obituaries seem now to be a bit premature. With economic expectations rising across the country, workers have begun reaching out for unions. And unions are finding allies outside the workplace among the progressive political activists from whom they’d been estranged since the Vietnam War. Stranger still, at the center of all this activity in many cities is the oft-maligned central labor council.

As David Moberg reports in The American Prospect (Sept. 11, 2000), labor and political activists in several dozen cities have reinvented these creaky outfits—traditionally focused on "golf outings, breakfasts with local business leaders, and photo opportunities with politicians collecting a campaign check"—as engines of a budding "union cities" movement. "Labor can become more of a social movement again—a working-class social movement that connects a multiplicity of workers . . . and also links their on-the-job interests with the needs of their home communities," Moberg writes.

The Milwaukee County Labor Council, for instance, helped elect two union members to the county board of supervisors as part of a larger campaign for an ordinance outlawing anti-union harassment. The Cleveland labor council has fostered successful organizing efforts in a number of local companies by rounding up politicians, clergy, and community groups for rallies in the tony neighborhoods of executives who are trying to stamp out union activity. In the Quad Cities region of Illinois and Iowa, the labor council has run teachers, mail carriers, and firefighters for local office. As Ron Judd, former executive secretary of the King County Labor Council in Seattle, tells Moberg, "If elected officials can’t support us on the basic right to organize, [if they can’t] stand up at their desk or on the back of a flatbed truck at the picket line and denounce employers who attack workers, I don’t know why we should support them."